Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento

Yeah.

And it's like an accessible thing, too.

You know, I think it's a lot easier to write a few lines and play it on your guitar and record yourself and put it on TikTok than it is to produce a whole song.

I think it's accessible from a creator's standpoint and also as an audience member.

Like, I think these are very straightforward lyrics that are very clear and explicit about what they're talking about.

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question because I think, to your point, those artists who were making that music never really went away.

Joan Baez performed with Jesse Wells recently.

She joined him on stage.

Those people have still been around.

And there's been new generations that have obviously kept making folk music, protest music, you name it.

But I think...

After the 60s and 70s, when there was that heyday of, you know, protests for civil rights, protests against the Vietnam War, all of this sort of social change happening in the country, the music industry really started to change.

This is a question I asked musicologist Tammy Kernodle.

She also teaches at Miami University.

And this is what she told me.

So, you know, like the 70s, the 80s, you start to see the rise of like MTV and capital P pop music.

And like this folk protest music doesn't really go away, but it becomes way less central to like mainstream culture.

And I will say, you know, there's definitely a lot of politics in other kinds of music, like pop music is political in its own way.

And you have the rise of all of these genres like pop.

you know, hip hop and into the 90s and 2000s, you have reggaeton and all of this music that, you know, pushes for a lot of political and social change.